While campaigning for the presidency, Trump used U.S. inflation as a cudgel to bash his political opponents with. Seth Meyers thinks he’ll soon be forced to turn the hammer on himself.
According to Trump, the Biden administration is responsible for the “the worst inflation we’ve ever had.” It isn’t true. Trump promised his voters that he was the candidate that could lower the inflation rate. That also isn’t true, and according to Seth Meyers, Trump knows it.
“He can’t” said Meyers in response to a recent Trump press conference where the president-elect ignored inflation in favor or sharing plans to invade Greenland. “And he knows he can’t, and he doesn’t care that he can’t.” Despite inflation being major topic in his Person of the Year interview with Time Magazine, Trump has since kept quiet on the subject. Meyers pointed out that Trump’s attitude surrounding inflation was more somber during the interview itself, and that while Trump once promised that it would be easy to bring the price of groceries “way down” in an NBC interview a week before, he told Time “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up.” According to Meyers, this means that Trump would be a “terrible president” and an “even worse airline pilot.”
Meyers’ mockery of the president-elect didn’t stop there. He poked fun at the fact that Trump appeared to make the bizarre claim that he was the first person to ever use the word “groceries” during his Meet The Press interview with NYC. ““I won on groceries. Very simple word, groceries. Like almost—you know, who uses the word? I started using the word—the groceries,” rambled Trump. According to Meyers, Trump is right, before he popularized the word, everyone called the supermarket the “apple chicken bread coffee milk potato cereal store.”
Meyers is right, grocery prices—or the price of any other goods—won’t be going down under Trump. If anything, they’ll skyrocket. Trump is likely to kickstart inflation on day one in office when he and his “border czar” Tom Hooman put their “mass deportation” plans into action. Besides inflation, another mainstay the Trump campaign was immigration, and Trump promised that he would forcibly remove tens of millions of undocumented migrants from U.S. soil. The terrible human cost of such an effort aside, the mass deportation of millions will have a devastating effects on the U.S. economy. According to analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, if Trump were to deport even one tenth of the amount of migrants he plans to, the resulting inflation would keep on climbing well into 2028. The effort would also severely hinder America’s agricultural industry, which uses migrant labor as the backbone of its operations. If that happens, grocery prices alone under Trump will likely reach history highs.
Trump’s mass deportation effort isn’t the only thing that will cause a surge in inflation. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Trump’s tariff plan will also cause inflation to climb while simultaneously shrinking the U.S. economy. The tariffs will likely cause a price increase across a wide range of goods, including electronics, toys, and yes—groceries.
“Tell us, how are you going to get grocery prices down?” asked Meyers of Trump. “You talked about this, like, every day on the campaign trail… you even brought props.” Meyers then played a clip of Trump rambling about “rain coming down from heaven” at a press conference. “That’s not rain,” said Meyers “those are God’s tears from having to watch this press conference.” When Trump takes office and inflation climbs, American tears are sure to flow too.
